Turkeys

The reverberations of an extraterrestrial impact obliterated three-fourths of animal and plant species—but did not extinguish the bird ancestors of today’s galliforms, the order of ground-feeding birds that includes quail, chickens, and turkeys. Their predecessors were spared from destruction while the dominant birds of the era—likely large, toothed, and tree-dwelling—may have been victimized by widespread forest fire and atmospheric disturbance.

Most galliforms, including turkeys, fall into the smaller scientific-classification Phasianidae—the pheasant family—for which fossil evidence first finds distinction from other galliforms roughly 30 million years ago. Pheasants, partridges, and Old World quail are among the 150 species of Phasianidae patrolling Earth’s grounds today. Like all families, they share some general physical traits: short beaks, powerful legs, and stout bodies.

Fossil evidence shows that Mesoamerican people had long hunted turkeys, but by 180 CE they had domesticated flocks in the Tehuacán Valley of what is now eastern-central Mexico—making the modern turkey the most widely consumed animal descended from “New World” ancestors. Archaeological evidence indicates that, slightly later, the Anasazi of today’s American Southwest were also keeping Melleagris gallopavo, though perhaps a different subspecies.

In Aztec mythology, the god Chalchiuhtotolin, sometimes referred to as the god of plagues, embodied extreme states of being. Chalchiuhtotolin took at least two corporeal forms. In his human form, called Tezcatlipoca, he promoted self-punishment and self-destruction—but when appearing as a “bejeweled” or “emerald fowl,” or “jade turkey,” he wielded the power to eradicate sins.

The hunter-gatherer ancestors of the Navajo people are believed to have arrived in the western US around 1400 CE with language connections to the Apache and native people in Canada. In one version of the Navajo emergence myth, Turkey shook his feathers, spreading seed for squash, beans, and melons across the land. Today, ecologists tout the value of plant diversification that ground-dwelling birds advance through the eating and dispersal of seeds.

At first, Spanish conquistadors called turkeys “gallina de la tierra” (“land chickens”) when sending them to Europe. There, the birds’ likeness to African guinea fowl—“turkey cocks” in English, likely since guinea fowl were imported from Turkey—led the English to call them “turkeys.” In Spain, they came to be called “pavo,” the name previously used for peacocks, which were thereafter called “el pavo real”—in Spanish, “true” or “royal” peacocks.

After seeing Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital city, Cortes wrote of the abundance of turkeys and their eggs in street markets, at festivals, and in household yards. At Casas Grandes, a trading site in today’s northern Mexico, a large turkey population was kept for feathers and ritual sacrifice, but reportedly never eaten. The Zuni people, as described by Coronado’s expedition, kept turkeys to harvest feathers to fabricate clothing and adornment.

Historians have wrestled over whether Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey, rather than the bald eagle, to symbolize the nation. Franklin never promoted the turkey as an image to be used on currency or the national seal but, in a letter to his daughter, he did say the eagle was “of bad moral Character” while “the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird…a true original Native of America…though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage…”

To quit “cold turkey” is abrupt and uncomfortable—likely a reference to the clammy discomfort associated with addiction withdrawal and its similarity to the cold skin of a plucked turkey carcass. The phrase could also owe its origin to “talk turkey”—to discuss frankly—a version of which (“to talk cold turkey”) dates to the 1800s. “Poor as Job’s turkey,” an allusion to poverty still heard in the American South, likely arose in the same era.

Now the largest organization working on behalf of turkey farmers, processors, and “industry partners,” the National Turkey Federation was founded in 1940. The NTF is proud to boast that American turkey consumption has nearly doubled in the past 50 years, as 223 million turkeys are killed each year. Recently, the NTF has worked mostly to reduce government oversight, especially regarding packaging labels, water-use regulations, and labor practices.

In 1947, the NTF presented President Truman with a live turkey for the holiday season. In 1989, President Bush granted a “Presidential Pardon” to the NTF turkey, speculating about the bird’s probable anxiety. In recent years, social media voting has determined which of two nominated birds will be the “National Turkey,” bringing the President’s exoneration lottery for two innocent birds into the 21st century.

Between 1960, when the USDA began keeping such statistics, and 2018, the average weight of a domestic turkey at slaughter more than doubled—from 15.1 pounds to 31.1 pounds. As with similar trends in different livestock animals, such growth depends on extremely selective breeding practices that can only be achieved via systematic artificial insemination, since such breeding seems to produce turkeys too big to breed naturally.

The number of turkeys slaughtered annually in the US peaked at just over 300 million in 1996 and has declined steadily ever since, to 223 million in 2020—the lowest level since 1986. However, over the same period since 1996, the amount of turkey meat produced has held relatively steady at 7.5 billion pounds. The breeding of unnaturally super-sized turkeys has allowed “farmers” to squeeze more revenue out of each bird’s body.